Martin Devaux is a Ph.D. candidate in political science, specializing in the comparative political economy of Western democracies and in political methodology. His research investigates the politics of immigration and the rise of far-right populism by developing new methods and datasets and improving measurement in empirical research.
His dissertation demonstrates that immigrant entrepreneurship influences local support for the far right. The presence of immigrants and their passive characteristics—such as skills or ethnicity—only reveal part of their effect on natives’ voting behavior. By examining immigrants’ economic choices, particularly the decision to start a business rather than pursue salaried employment, he shows how scholars can uncover new mechanisms through which natives come to support far-right parties. In related work, he studies the political determinants of immigrant entrepreneurship and the consequences of discrimination on immigrants’ political behavior. Methodologically, he develops quantitative approaches that encourage applied researchers to consider the external validity of their work and provide tools to easily assess threats to generalizability.
His research is supported by the Columbia Center for Political Economy and the Columbia Experimental Laboratory for Social Sciences.
Mr. Devaux was previously an associate at IDinsight in Rabat, Morocco. He holds an MPA from the London School of Economics and an MPP from Sciences Po Paris, and graduated in 2016 with a B.A. in economics from Keio University, Tokyo, and a B.A. from Sciences Po Paris.
